Posted
by
timothy
on Monday September 15, 2003 @08:23PM
from the gotcha dept.

DragonHawk writes "As of a little while ago (it is around 7:45 PM US Eastern on Mon 15 Sep
2003 as I write this), VeriSign added a wildcard A record to the .COM and .NET TLD DNS zones. The IP address returned is 64.94.110.11, which reverses
to sitefinder.verisign.com. What that means in plain English is that most mis-typed domain names that
would formerly have resulted in a helpful error message now results in a
VeriSign advertising opportunity. For example, if my domain name was
'somecompany.com,' and somebody typed 'soemcompany.com' by mistake, they
would get VeriSign's advertising." Read on below for some more information.

"(VeriSign is a company which purchased Network Solutions, another company
which was given the task by the US government of running the .COM and .NET
top-level domains (TLDs). VeriSign has been exploiting the Internet's DNS
infrastructure ever since.)

This will have the immediate effect of making network trouble-shooting
much more difficult. Before, a mis-typed domain name in an email address,
web browser, or other network configuration item would result in an obvious
error message. You might not have known what to do about it, but at least
you knew something was wrong. Now, though, you will have to guess. Every
time.

Some have pointed out that this will make an important anti-spam check
impossible. A common anti-spam measure is to check and make sure the domain
name of the sender really exists. (While this is easy to force, every
little bit helps.) Since all .COM and .NET domain names now exist, that
anti-spam check is useless.

what are the chances - using the [verisign.com]search page that comes up at theverisign site to search for "register" we find at the top of thelist a link to networksolutions.com (a verisign company). we alsonote that searching for the same word at google [google.com]
does not result in that site being present in at least the first four pages of results.

Actually, the verisign search seems to be pretty good. A search for FUCK VERISIGN [verisign.com] returns a slashdot article about verisign sending out deceptive domain renewal mail as the second result.

Verisign has continually been abusing the power that has been handed out to them. Two such examples are its mailing of false renewal notices, and its most recent exploit: sitefinder.verisign.com. Now, nearly all mistyped names will be sent to Verisign where they can do whatever they like to the unwitting user. There are even categories on sitefinder.verisign.com where one can browse and go to sites which are undoubtedly paying Verisign for the space.

Please take this, and the hundreds or thousands of e-mails you will receive, into consideration, and exercise the power that ICANN has. Verisign has continually been abusing and tricking people through deceptive business practices, and this should be the last straw. Verisign should not only be removed from it's post, but it should also be fined for its numerous escapades designed to make money.

Sincerely,
Michael B****

I've got to wonder: where do they come up with such evil ideas? Verisign must have a beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...

Speaking of search engines. What would happen if a significant number of web sites put links on every page to a poison page. This poison page would generate 10,000 random links of the form "www.verisignblows948950948393903848585.com", with the number obviously being random. How long would it take for all the search engines and web crawlers to hit this and have a serious impact on verisigns servers?

Now, I'm not suggesting anybody do this, I'm just asking the question.

Second, do you really think Google doesn't know how to handle wildcards by now? Think about it for a second. Even Slashdot has a wildcard - anything dot slashdot.org goes to the homepage. Does Google index Slashdot an infinite amount of times? Of course not. Why should it be different for anything dot com?

Do you know how a DNS wildcard works? Apparently not. There is a SINGLE record that resolves all nonexistent.com and.net addresses to Verisign's sitefinder. Although I'm sure Google's massive server farm can handle storing 10,000 addresses it won't even have to. As soon as it sees the domain resolves to the same address it can move on.

It's a single record for verisign, but there's no difference in the DNS response record. This means that a caching DNS has to keep every record that it gets back. This means that you could overload Google, but verisign would be unlikely to be affected.

And you can't ignore domains that resolve to identical addresses. Virtual web servers share the same address with different domain names. The web server uses the name to decide which set of web pages to serve up.

From VeriSign global registry services... I have access to them - you just need to sign a contract with them. It's not hard.

Google caches IP info a good deal longer than is specified by TTL and such, and a lot of other fancy bandwidth reducing (but frustrating) tricks). Its known by people who pay a lot of attention to google, based on observations. Many people have good reason to pay attention to google - they make their living from the traffic they get from google.

Sure you do, if you have a REAL router (or a DSL router even) you should be able to null-route that IP. Or actually, you might even be able to convince your ISP to do it with a short, friendly letter to the admin.

This complaint is regarding Verisign's recent decision to claim all non-registered.com and.net domain names for itself. It has done this by inserting a wildcard into the DNS registers, meaning an IP of 64.94.110.11 is returned for any domain name that has not yet been registered. That page is an advert for Verisign's domin registration services
This is unfair competition with existing registrars - there is no means for myself, for example, to gain a similar foothold without actually purchasing each and every currently unregistered.com/.net name. It is also a technical breach of trust - the internet is not merely the web, and unknown domains should return errors rather than constantly try to contact Versign advert servers. Non web-based applications, such as ftp clients etc., will now incorrectly log that they have contacted the host you asked for when in fact they should have returned an error 'hostname unknown'. The same for traceroute, ping...any of these will not behave in a manner expected.
I would be grateful if you could investigate this matter.
Yours,
Ian McCall

If your ISP won't switch over or you don't want to run your own nameserver.. there is a list [unrated.net] of publicly available tier 2 servers that you can switch to that are offered by OpenNIC members.

Here's a form-letter version of the email I'm about to shoot off to our rep, the delightful(!) Barbara:

Dear [Thawte Rep Name],

I am an employee (and listed CSO) of [company name], which purchases 128-bit SSL certificates from Thawte. We purchase approximately [x] certificates a year, which works out to approximately $US[y] per year.

As you might be aware, Verisign, parent company of Thawte, has recently introduced a deceptive and misleading practise with regards to DNS resolution of non-existent domains. Any attempt to locate the IP address of a domain which is not registered (www.non-existent-domain.com) will, rather than returning an error message, return the address of a Verisign advertising server.

This practice is not only ethically dubious, it is also something which promises to cause untold headaches for network administrators all over the world, as well as confusion for end-users of the Internet, all purely for the financial benefit of Verisign.

I am not writing this letter to you in an official capacity as representative of my company: however, I wish to advise you that come certificate renewal time, I will be strongly recommending to my company that we change to an alternate SSL certificate provider, rather than Thawte, if this practice of Verisign's is still in place.

As the listed CSO of this company, I strongly expect that my stance will result in the direct and immediate loss of this $US[y] worth of annual business to Thawte.

This is an selfish and narrow-minded move on the part of Verisign, and I have no hesitation in recommending that my company withdraw its business from Thawte.

Kind Regards,

[Your Name],[Your location]

We're a small company: but even in our case, [x] and [y] are are 10 and 3000 respectively. It won't take that many to make a sizeable hole in Thawte's pockets.

ICANN is responsible for, among other things, ensuring that it's registrars perform their duties properly. If an issue such as this one crops up, and the/. community (trolls and non-trolls alike) decide to make their complaints known using the established protocol that ICANN itself has provided for such matters, so be it. Yes, this will generate an enormous volume of sometimes absurd attempts at flaming, and yes, someone at ICANN has probably filtered all that traffic - although I suspect not to a circular file as you seem to suggest, but to a count-aggregation file to provide a record of public comment.

Face it - sometimes, being responsible for a little thing like the internet can be a bitch. Most of us do have to deal with inane crap as a part of our daily grind, although I admit that getting 20,000 emails suggesting I view a goatsex link in a single day would probably be unusual for me at least. But at least ICANN has said outright that they aren't going to read all of them:) But that's their job, and the closetfull of people who work for ICANN get paid to do it, knowing fulll well that things like this will happen. Big deal. Such is life, such is work. Or do you have a job where your responsibility is guaranteed to be 100% hassle-free? If so, I applaud and doubt you.

until we get gator-type forced advertising (not just incidental unrelated ads on the page) whenever you make the slightest domain mistake? I get the feeling this doesn't bode well for the continued freedom of the internet, if one company can unilaterally do something of this magnitude. (But then again, Mr. Bush seems to get along fine.)

This happened to my mother just yesterday. She calls me complaining about "my computer has a virus!" I countered that their was no way her computer could know. This went on for a while..

My mother is visually impared. She was trying to go to www.biblegateway.com, but she went to www.gatewaybible.com. sacreligious scum.

It's hard for her to find the stupid MODAL popup windows when she is using a screen magnifier and the whole screen is not even showing...

A DNS error would have been MUCH nicer. She would not have even called me costing my employer productivity. Currently I know somebody is wasting money on those parked domains. This verisign situation is just sad.

The IE rediect to the MSN search mess is configurable: you can turn it off AND turn off the stupid useless 'all errors are one thing' error page and make IE actually give you something useful, at least with IE 5.5 and 6.

HOWEVER, you can bet that MS and AOL and everyone else who does something interesting and useful with HTTP queries that look for bad domain names (like some ISP's that have proxies for users and some companies that have proxies for employers) will be pissed off. Different people like to do different things with their NXDOMAIN responses, and Verisign has just made sure that a lot of those responses never happen and that only Verisign gets to choose what the user sees instead.

There essentially are no more unregistered.(com|net) domains. Verisign has just in effect registered all unregistered domains in those TLD's and pointed them at their own little cash-spinner.

So let me get this straight.....If I own http://www.hardtospelldomain.com, and someone mispells it, Verisign now has the opportunity to offer up the highest bidders site for redirects? Even potential competitors? Perhaps I'm missing something here, but wouldn't this open them to all kinds of lawsuits from companies that were affected in that way?

Not only will mail have problems, as the "non-existent domain" check will always fail.. but this is completely criminal it seems.

I hate to mention, but they are giving Microsoft a dose of their own medicine.. taking away their ability to bring you to their 'search' page for non-existent domains.. and AOL's own feature similar to that. It hurts google, since Verisign teamed with yahoo on this one for search services (Although, google provides yahoos search functionality for now).

All.com domains are resolving with an authoratitive section of Verisign's server.. and.net's with the list of root servers. It would seem that no domain should ever resolve with either of those as an authority.. The real dns server for the domain should. Hopefully BIND and other DNS packages will start blocking domains that have a root server or a verisign server as the authoratitive dns server.

Further.. they'll be harvesting bounced email addresses for sure. If you get spammed from a bunk domain, and it gets returned.. or you typo and email address.. they are nice enough to run a mail daemon on port 25 to harvest those addresses. It lets you helo, from, rcpt, and data.. and then closes your connection.. just long enough to snag all the info it wants from you.

This entire thing is a mess, and seems like it should be highly illegal. Hopefully OpenSRS and GoDaddy and others will have a fit over it. This just seems completely wrong.

think about it.. your dns server caches the entries it gets back, but now we can make scripts that check sequentially all the way up! crash your ISPs name servers, or crash a root server for the prize! remember kids, take down 2/3 + 1 of the root servers and it's not running on spec anymore!

That's not hillarious, that's maddening beyond my ability to properly express.
Especially, #10 - Sole Remedy:
"YOUR USE OF THE VERISIGN SERVICES IS AT YOUR OWN RISK. IF YOU ARE DISSATISFIED WITH ANY OF THE MATERIALS, RESULTS OR OTHER CONTENTS OF THE VERISIGN SERVICES OR WITH THESE TERMS AND CONDITIONS, OUR PRIVACY STATEMENT, OR OTHER POLICIES, YOUR SOLE REMEDY IS TO DISCONTINUE USE OF THE VERISIGN SERVICES OR OUR SITE."
If you don't like what Verisign is doing, get off the Internet.
This could well inspire even our current Administration to smack them down. This is the most hubris-laden abuse of a monopoly I've heard of in a long time.

This also traps all mail sent TO a non-existent domain. Since all RFC-compliant mail servers will follow up a negative MX response with an A lookup and connect to that IP, if you send mail to a bogus domain, it goes to verisign's server, which (currently) bounces it. Imagine the fun the federal government can have subpoena'ing those logs.

Also, you'll note the cookies that 'sitefinder' sends out, so they can uniquely track any traffic to that site. Also a fun subpoena opportunity. And did you read the fun terms of service that they claim you agree to by 'choosing to visit' their site?

I doubt this will stand. I certainly know that, as a major ISP executive, we'll be reviewing our business with Verisign.

Okay, everybody and their brother is trying to resolve "bogusdomainname.com" or whatever and finding they get a NXDOMAIN error (as they should). There are a lot of possible reasons for this, which I will simply handwave as "caching".

To see the real thing in action, query an authoritative nameserver directly. For example:

The first query uses the default resolver on my system, which is a local named which in turn forwards to my ISP's resolvers, which do who knows what. The second query says to ask a.gtld-servers.net, which causes the host utility to send the query directly to one of the authoritative nameservers for the GTLDs (Global Top Level Domains, as opposed to country-specific domains like.us). Then I see the current authoritative response.

This is horrible for web spiders and search engines. Every link to a dead domain name will now result in a series of pages that need to be indexed. And there will be thousands (millions?) of web sites that all offer Verisign name registrations -- all identical. This will surely affect their page rankings! Spiders will have to be hard-coded to ignore certain IP addresses or DNS names.

I hope they get sued by every mail filter vendor, registrar, and search engine that they just damaged with this. And the government needs to review the powers they are granting to name-server providers.

Starting nmap 3.28 ( www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2003-09-15 06:36 PDTHost sitefinder.verisign.com (12.158.80.10) appears to be up... good.Initiating SYN Stealth Scan against sitefinder.verisign.com (12.158.80.10) at 06:36Adding open port 80/tcpThe SYN Stealth Scan took 94 seconds to scan 1643 ports.Warning: OS detection will be MUCH less reliable because we did not find at least 1 open and 1 closed TCP portFor OSScan assuming that port 80 is open and port 36304 is closed and neither are firewalledFor OSScan assuming that port 80 is open and port 43206 is closed and neither are firewalledFor OSScan assuming that port 80 is open and port 44655 is closed and neither are firewalledInteresting ports on sitefinder.verisign.com (12.158.80.10):(The 1642 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: filtered)Port State Service80/tcp open httpNo exact OS matches for host (test conditions non-ideal).TCP/IP fingerprint:SInfo(V=3.28%P=i386-portbld-freebsd5.1%D=9/15%Time=3F65C0E9%O=80%C=-1)TSeq(Class=TR% IPID=Z%TS=U)T1(Resp=Y%DF=Y%W=16A0%ACK=S++%Flags= AS%Ops=MNNTNW)T1(Resp=Y%DF=Y%W=16D0%ACK=S++%Flag s=AS%Ops=MNW)T2(Resp=N)T3(Resp=Y%DF=Y%W=16D0%A CK=S++%Flags=AS%Ops=MNW)T4(Resp=Y%DF=Y%W=0%ACK=O %Flags=R%Ops=)T5(Resp=N)T6(Resp=N)T7(Resp=N)PU(Resp=N)

They aren't. "Filtered" means the packet sent to that port simply disappeared, without even a error packet coming back to indicate the failure. In other words, indistinguishable from "There is no machine at all receiving the packet". Here's how to use nmap [insecure.org], see the third paragraph.

The server is only running smtp and http, and theoretically it could be running services on the tens of thousands of other ports you didn't scan, but it almost certainly isn't.

Those filtered ports are why the nmap scan took 24.611 seconds; system without filtered ports will go faster then that under normal circumstances.

Simply block all traffic to 64.94.110.11 and give verisign your hate mail as well. It'll still return the error message whenever that address is found, so even if it is hosted, it's as good as not registered.

This a stupid stupid stupid move by them, Akin to shooting themselves in the foot with a 45 caliber pistol; it's going to anger a lot of people in the IT industry.

This is one helluva of a way to drum up traffic, so I'd be curious to know what kind of steroid-pumped uber-server and fat petabyte pipe they plan to run their site on. Personally, I suspect the ad page will be taken down by Verisign themselves when they smell smoke coming from the server room and see their sysadmin's running around naked on the front lawn while tearing out their hair and screaming "SWEET MOTHER OF SMEGMA, MAKE THEM STOP!!!".

I find it very hard to believe that they will be able to get away with this without some response from the US (and EU) government(s).

Sorry to say this, but this is going to be a precedent for Internet being regulated, this time for real. And you'll be able to thank Verisign for it. Perhaps that's a provocative step to achieve what they are really after - being regulated, which will guarantee them longevity.

Just to see what would happen, I just tried sending an e-mail to <testuser@slashdoct.com>. Would they bounce the message? If so what would the error message look like? If they didn't bounce it, would they just keep it? Read it? Inquring minds want to know!

Well it bounced:

The original message was received at Mon, 15 Sep 2003 21:06:55 -0500 (CDT)
from [myhost.mydomain] [xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]

I've seen several people now post sessions they've had with "Snubby". Snubby is assuming that people are ordering things in a specific order. A session I just had with it:telnet 64.94.110.11 25Trying 64.94.110.11...Connected to 64.94.110.11.Escape character is '^]'.220 snubby3-wceast Snubby Mail Rejector Daemon v1.3 ready

250 OK

250 OK

550 User domain does not exist.

250 OK

221 snubby3-wceast Snubby Mail Rejector Daemon v1.3 closing transmission channelConnection closed by foreign host.That's right. It doesn't parse the input at all (I just hit Enter a bunch of times). If you have multiple RCPT lines, or have an extra command in there anywhere, you will get an OK in the wrong place and it will look like you have succeeded.

A Letter of Complaint about actions undertaken by Verisign Incorporatedon or about 9/13/03.

Sent to the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers and theInternet Assigned Number Authority.

Doug Dumitruxxxxx xxxxxx xxxx Roadxxxxxx xxxxxx, CA 9xxxx949 xxx-xxxx

Dear sirs,

As you are probably aware, Verisign is redirecting unregistered2nd-level domains in the.com and.net TLDs to a Verisign owned searchengine. They are using a technique known as DNS wildcarding toaccomplish this.

I firmly believe that this is clearly an abuse of the DNS system, thatit violates the technical requirements for domain lookups, that theresults returned are fraudulent, and that this technical action onlybenefits Verisign at the expense of the rest of the internet population.

I respectfully request that IANA and ICANN immediately take actionagainst Verisign demanding that Verisign cease this fraudulent anddamaging behaviour. Should Verisign refuse, I would recommend that IANAand/or ICANN (and/or the US government) take immediate action to revokeVerisign's contract to administer the.com and.net TLDs.

I would also recommend that IANA and/or ICANN immediately pass "bestpractice" rules that prevent other TLDs and country-code domains fromfollowing in Verisign's deceptive footsteps. It is important that a"domain not found" error not be subverted into an advertising opportunity.

It seems that they have effectively violated the ICANN Domain Name Dispute Policy [icann.org]: "circumstances indicating that you have registered or you have acquired the domain name primarily for the purpose of selling, renting, or otherwise transferring the domain name registration". They're definitely doing this to sell domains.

I used VeriSign added a wildcard A record to the.COM and.NET TLD DNS zones as the subject of the email. You could use something more original if you want.

To whom it may concern,
Verisign is commiting a major injustice that cannot be allowed to continue. It is important ICANN consider what is best for the internet community as a whole and take proper action. Proper action would be to immediately stop this monopolistic behavior from Verisign.

Please read below for more information taken from Slashdot.org:

As of a little while ago (it is around 7:45 PM US Eastern on Mon 15 Sep 2003 as I write this), VeriSign added a wildcard A record to the.COM and.NET TLD DNS zones. The IP address returned is 64.94.110.11, which reverses to sitefinder.verisign.com. What that means in plain English is that most mis-typed domain names that would formerly have resulted in a helpful error message now results in a VeriSign advertising opportunity. For example, if my domain name was 'somecompany.com,' and somebody typed 'soemcompany.com' by mistake, they would get VeriSign's advertising.

This will have the immediate effect of making network trouble-shooting much more difficult. Before, a mis-typed domain name in an email address, web browser, or other network configuration item would result in an obvious error message. You might not have known what to do about it, but at least you knew something was wrong. Now, though, you will have to guess. Every time.

Some have pointed out that this will make an important anti-spam check impossible. A common anti-spam measure is to check and make sure the domain name of the sender really exists. (While this is easy to force, every little bit helps.) Since all.COM and.NET domain names now exist, that anti-spam check is useless.

The internet belongs to everyone. It is not something that can be bought and sold by any one entity. Please put a stop to this behavior.

Thank you.
---insert name here---
---insert city and state of residence here---

This is so amazingly reckless and damaging that I don't know where to begin.

A few hours ago I was trying to troubleshoot a lame delegation to another zone. It seemed to be working which puzzled me to no end. It turns out the lame DNS server was returning 64.94.110.11.

Lame delegation is a very common phenomenon and (in the case of a typo) can often be diagnosed with NXDOMAIN being returned for the glue RR record. Never returning NXDOMAIN means that many types of lame delegation will no longer be caught.

One of my peer zones had a typo'ed MX record. Before VeriSign's sabotage (yes, sabotage) the lookup of the corresponding address record would simply fail with NXDOMAIN. The source MTA would then try to deliver to the secondary MTAs on the list of MX records in order of priority. Mail delivery would proceed normally using the secondary MTA(s).

However to my complete and utter astonishment, 64.94.110.11 has a working MTA listening on port 25 (why???). This means that any MX records with typos in the primary record will have all their e-mail redirected to VeriSign's MTA. Mail that would normally automatically be re-routed to the secondary MTA instead now gets bounced by Verisign's ''Snubby Mail Rejector Daemon v1.3''. Not returning NXDOMAIN will break mail delivery to secondary MTAs.

And what about spam filters? It will break any spam filter that tries to verify that the source MTA hostname claimed in the HELO request is resolvable (i.e. that the claimed HELO name is not fictious).

I could probably list another half dozen problems if I thought about it. I can't believe the arrogance (read: stupidity) of this act.

I can't wait to see reaction reaction from the backbone cabal on NANOG.

At my last check, only the "a", "c", and "d" COM servers are serving the global A record for *.COM.

I am removing those broken nameservers from my root zone hints at all of the places that I administer. Hopefully enough root servers will remain clean of this aborration to keep up a good level of service.

I encourage others everywhere to do the same and ask their ISPs follow suit. If you don't play fairly with the public trust, the public should stop trusting you.

If Verisign can hijack *.COM and *.NET, what is to keep resolving ISPs from hijacking unused domains at the resolver level to suit their own purposes?

Where was the RFC on this practice? It would never have passed peer review.

--Eric ZiegastFormer TLD administrator.Former hostmaster at a major ISP.

Took a look at their setup, and from what I can see, they have partnered with Overture to get their search results. Overture is a pay per click search engine, meaning advertisers bid to get to the top of the search results - anywhere from $0.10 to $50. Most arrangements involve Overture getting half of the the bid, and VeriSign getting the other half.

What this means is that they are making money (probably hundreds of thousands if not millions daily) from most of the searches you make.

Topics which attract high bids (up to $50 per click, it is shocking) include online casinos, dedicated servers, refinancing, and a few others.

I implore you all:

If you want this to stop, please do not click on any of the search results from this 'search engine'. Doing so will contribute to the profit VeriSign will make from this. If you really really want to click on one of the listings plase go to www.overture.com and get it directly from them.

Other things we can do include:

1) Putting them on the spam RBLs for spamming the entire internet. This will have the effect of blackholing them from some parts of the internet that drop packets based on those RBLs right at the router level.

2) Encourage your vendors to modify their DNS server packages to change results for that IP to NXDOMAIN.

The whole thing was done exactly with thispurpose, but I think it can be used to break thesystem. If enough bots (and bots only)constantly "click" on the ads, their price willplummet. Since now they cannot tell if a personsaw the ad, they "pay per click" becomespointless. (and boy they will be mad when findout they paid all that money for nothing)

On the other other hand if every slashdoterwould ping the thing it would be way more fun.Come one everybody just type : ping 64.94.110.11(at -t if you are in windows)

A fellow SA Goon (thatdog), pointed this out, and it could perhaps be a nice fun tool to screw with them...I'll quote his post over there:

thatdog said:The most amusing part of this to me is they take whatever is passed in the url parameter and shove it into the html of their page, no questions asked. Remote scripting exploits will be ever so easy!

If you don't get what I'm talking about, just check out this link [verisign.com].

Would be fun to see redirects on major isps and backbones...or even forwarding to an alternate site hosted elsewhere with an explanation.

Try libverisignfix.c [slashdot.org].
It's an LD_PRELOAD hack to intercept gethostbyname, gethostbyname_r, and gethostbyname2_r. It doesn't intercept anything else (like getaddrinfo), but it works in Mozilla.

IANAL, but I dated on once, so take this for what it's worth. This appears to me to be a clear violation of anti-trust laws. Verisign is using their monopoly position as the root DNS to create business opportunities which are not available to others. Verisign can create a nearly infinite number of domains for free, and sell advertising on all those domains. Any of their competition would have to pay for those domains (in fact, would have to pay Verisign). If this isn't abuse of a monopoly position, nothing is. Somebody should sue them under the Sherman Anti-Trust act and get an immediate injunction against them.

I've created a Squid redirector to deal with this problem. I tried to post it here, but couldn't get past the Slashdot lameness filter.

It catches anything going to a gTLD's wildcard response (there's about 15 gTLDs doing this!) and redirects it to google. It also does some other niceties that don't automatically happen when using a proxy, such as adding www. and.org/.com/.net if needed.

If anybody wants the code, then post a reply here and I'll set up a web page with it and post the URL. (I won't bother if nobody wants it.)

You may want to know, also, that some of the NANOG folks have patches for BIND to change these responses back into NXDOMAIN.

Oh, and what happens with that address is unreachable, down, DoSed, or whatever... your mail will sit in the queue for some configured amount of time with zero indication of the user's error.

Remedy:1) blackhole that IP - PERMANENTLY. (blacklist their entire IP assignement(s))2) modify bind to return NXDOMAIN for any query containing that IP.3) make aformenttioned modification a configuration option (list) thus making it easy to adjust when the assh^W^Wthey change the address.4) add my own choice wildcard entries:-)5) kill every living thing at Verisign/Network Solutions even remotely involved with this bullshit (as an example to others who have not learned to participate in a civilized society.)

There's a real big difference between me adding *.bar.com and someone adding *.com.. The wildcard record was originally intended to reduce the number of records -- specifically to negate the need for an MX record for every host. And honestly, it's never worked to anyone's satisfaction (e.g. the ability to send email to bob@[censored].bar.com)

One of many problems is that web.archive.org [archive.org] will honor the/robots.txt of any host and remove that host from its archive. So, sooner or later, the archive of all formerly (and currently no longer) registered domains will be gone...

So if a script kiddie out there is trying to test his hostname parsing code in his latest DDoS tools, and tries to use a hostname that he knows doesn't exist, would he be liable for the damage his scriptz cause when that hostname actually does resolve to a Verisign IP address?

It really sounds like Verisign wants traffic destined for every mistyped or invalid hostname. I say let them have it. Surely they're aware that the Internet is not just the web.

Explain to the engineer that you have typed in an non-existant domain name andbeen directed to their sitefinder service.

Explain that you have read the "Terms of Use" and do not agree to abide bythem.

Explain that, as you don't agree to the ToU, you are explicitly forbidden fromusing their service.

Ask them to exclude your IP block from those that will be given the sitefinderIP rather than NXDOMAIN.

Give them your name, company (if appropriate) and a contact telephone number.

US and Canada: The contact page number is 888-642-9675. Apparently they will also refer you to 866-345-0330 (which isn't listed on that page), but you should of course check the number given on their official contact page and call that first. The postal address is VeriSign, Inc., Attention: Legal Department, 21355 Ridgetop Circle, Dulles, VA 20166, USA.

Verisign has forgotten that they don't own the Internet: they were granted the power to run the root servers and manage primary DNS by the federal government. That government-granted monopoly is revocable. This is a risky maneuver, as it will have global implications. They will probably get their wrists slapped.

I feel it is worthwhile to post a more general response to this point as well.

There is this myth that "the Internet" exists as a single, cohesive network. It does not, and never has. "The Internet" is a network of networks. What that means is that a bunch of independent network operators have agreed to exchange traffic with each other because it benefits them. When you dial in to your ISP of choice (or plug in your Ethernet cable or whatever), you're not connecting to the Internet. You're connecting to your ISP. Your ISP probably connects to their ISP. Their ISP (if you're lucky) connects to several other ISPs, who connect to other ISPs, and so on. All these independent network operators form "the Internet". So, "the Internet" exists as an abstract concept (and a useful one), but not as something you can touch. Not even as something you can route traffic through. All you can do is connect to some other guy's network and hope for the best.

The reason this is important is because we are already seeing ISPs implementing countermeasures against this VeriSign move. Some are null-routing that IP address at layer two; others are using DNS tricks to give us the old behavior. If enough ISPs do this, VeriSign's move will be largely ineffective. In effect, ISPs as a community can veto VeriSign or anyone else. It only works if most of them agree and take action, of course, and it remains to be seen if they will do that. And, of course, some of these countermeasures may themselves be easily defeated, leading to an arms race (like the spammer vs anti-spam arms race).

The possible consequences of all this are, shall we say, interesting.

(BTW, I don't disagree with the OP's suggested course of action, nor with the principle behind it. I'm just pointing out that things are, as usual, more complicated then they might appear.)

Those spam-catching tools work by doing a reverse-dns lookup of the IP address that is trying to send the mail. This is different than doing a "forward"-dns lookup.

Not so.

A common spam filtering method is to check the envelope sender to see if the domain exists. Any mail that is sent with a faked envelope sender to which bounces can't be sent is spam.

That means querying for either an MX record or A record for that domain, and bouncing all the spam that doesn't have either. Now, thanks to verisign, all spam sent with forged envelope senders in.com or.net wil go straight through this spam filter, increasing the amount of spam in many peoples mailboxes.

Yes, in theory you could look for the magic A record returned, but to do so is something of an operational nightmare, and impossible to do with most current MTAs.

I checked their site [verisign.com], and found a Domain Names & Related Services contact number (888-642-9675), and gave it a try.

Unfortunately, the rep that answered the phone was unable to help, he said that he works for Network Solutions, and can only help with domain registration issues, and that the Verisign parent company runs the root nameservers. He was unable to give me a contact number for Verisign. However, you may want to try calling this number yourself to see if maybe a different rep has the contact number for Verisign.

I did a whois on the verisign.com domain, and came up with the main contact number for Verisign: 650-961-7500, but it's been ringing for the past 5 minutes, with no answer. One would think that they would have an automated voice-response system on their main number, so I think that they are being innudated with calls.

Requests for unknown.com names are handled by VeriSign's thirteen.com servers. As of 2003.09.16 01:35 UTC, the wildcard is on only four of those servers. So you may or may not see it; there's no guarantee that your ISP's DNS cache will contact a particular server.

Presumably VeriSign will copy the wildcard to the other servers at some point. I wouldn't be surprised if they're ramping up slowly, monitoring the load as they expand the wildcard coverage.

How big a problem will this be as most people/companies register common mispellings along with the right domain and make the mispellings point to the right site?

This was likely one of the primary motivations for this maneuver...to encourage formerly unnecessary registrations.

I've never registered mispellings of my companies domains, and the thought never even crossed my mind until now. I'm sure the crooks at Verisign saw this angle, in addition to the tons of free eyeballs.

I think we should all call tech support on their 800 number and complain.

U.S. and Canada: 888-642-9675
Worldwide: 1-703-742-0914

Lets see if we can get their hold queue time to several hours. Perhaps even ask to speak to a supervisor. Be sure to get names of everyone you talk to. Ask for names and phone number of the corporate officers. Compare them to SCO (ok, a bit off topic but I couldn't resist).